www.elsblog.org - Bringing Data and Methods to Our Legal Madness

02 May 2007

The Empirical Legal Studies Blog is pleased to announce the addition of Carolyn Shapiro, an Assistant Professor of Law at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, as a permanent editor. Carolyn earned a B.A. with general and special honors in English from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from the University of Chicago Harris Graduate School of Public Policy and a J.D. (high honors) from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was articles editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. After graduation, Carolyn was a law clerk for Chief Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court. Carolyn's scholarly interests include federal courts and labor and employment law, and she is the founder of the Empirical Legal Studies Junior Faculty listserv. (Click here to learn more of the ELS Listserv.)

While Michael linked to the paper below, it is also the subject of a NY Times article entitled Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls. Two highlights from the article: First, the caption under the headlining photo--"Minnesota Timberwolves guard Mike James, left, said he did not think he was treated differently by white and black officials"--says a lot about the need for systematic empirical inquiry. Second, the NY Times engaged in peer-review--"Three independent experts asked by The Times to examine the
Wolfers-Price paper and materials released by the N.B.A. said they
considered the Wolfers-Price argument far more sound." The article also discusses multivariate regression and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban's viewpoint on statistics. It's a must read!!!

"The essentially
arbitrary assignment of refereeing crews to basketball games, and the number
of repeated interactions allow us to convincingly test for own-race
preferences. We find that—even conditioning on player and referee fixed
effects (and specific game fixed effects)—that more personal fouls are
awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite-race
officiating crew than when officiated by an own-race refereeing crew. These
biases are sufficiently large that we find appreciable differences in
whether predominantly black teams are more likely to win or lose, according
to the racial composition of the refereeing crew."

01 May 2007

This Blog has written numerous times on the merits of peer-reviewed versus law journal placement (see, e.g., here and here). On the subject I once questioned whether hybrid law journals would develop that would take advantage of both faculty expertise and student editing. I wrote, "Stated another way, is there a journal model that could take full advantage of both student and faculty efforts?" The future is now.

First, this phenomenon will begin to arise in the specialty journals where faculty in those fields will take an increased role in article selection. In today's mail, I received this letter from the Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal that states, "In addition to our student editorial board, the ELJ's Faculty Editor (Adjunct Professor Paul Kibel) is directly involved in the article selection and editing process." I'd hope, at some point, that tenure-track faculty will also be part of such processes. Some law reviews already informally solicit faculty feedback; perhaps it's time to formalize the process. And specialty journals are uniquely situated to do this--student editorial boards could make the first cuts and faculty boards could make final decisions. Faculty members are far more willing to read papers in their areas of expertise than all the submissions received by general-subject journals. Thus, schools with a specialty journal that also employ a good number of faculty in that field are prime candidates for implementing some sort of peer-review process. (And I commend the Golden Gate University Environmental Law Journal on their effort which I am especially pleased to see in my field of environmental law.)

Second, to make some type of peer-review the norm in all general-subject law journals (and I leave to another day to discuss what type of peer-review), the elite law schools would have to be on board, using all of their faculty as reviewers in their areas of expertise. This would be a huge commitment by a Law School, its Law Review, and its Faculty, but it may have a substantial payoff.

Knowing well that Frank would never shamelessly plug himself, I will do it for him (and against his wishes). I am delighted to announce that the ELS blog's very own Frank Cross (Texas) has written a book, Decision Making in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, just released by Stanford University Press, that will assuredly interest those who study judicial decisionmaking. Frank's book makes an important contribution to an increasingly rich (and empirical) literature. From the dust-jacket:

"This groundbreaking book analyzes the decisions made by the United
States circuit courts over the past half century. These courts have a
profound impact on the law—they issue many more decisions in many more
areas of law than the Supreme Court. Cross demonstrates that while the
courts' judges are influenced by ideology and by the appointing
president, legal requirements exercise a much stronger influence on
their decisions. He also shows that these courts are independent of the
other branches of government and free from undue influence of various
parties. The book further introduces new research on the
precedent-setting power of decisions."